Here at Highfield Hall we encourage our children to investigate and explore in maths. We use lots of concrete resources and real-life experiences to enable children to fully engage in maths and understand the concepts they encounter. This is an approach recommended by maths specialists and consultants across the globe to enable children to fully understand key underlying principles. In this way we are ensuring children learn through understanding and experience. 

"All our experience and what we learn from research indicate that learning based on understanding is more enduring, more psychologically satisfying and more useful in practice than learning based mainly on the rehearsal of recipes and routines low in meaningfulness." Derek Haylock and Anne Cockburn

Autumn 1

We have been learning all about numbers and what they mean. We thought about what we saw in our heads when we thought of a number and talked about what numbers mean to us. We made numbers in lots of different ways and explored how numbers are different. We explored questions such as "What does 5 mean?" and "How are 5 and 7 different?"  We chose which resources we wanted to use to show our thinking and to explore numbers further. 

Singapore Bar Model

We have started learning about the bar model and how we can use this to represent addition. We used number facts we have already learnt to start thinking about how we can add parts together to make a whole! We are really good at our number bonds to 10 so we used raisins to make a bar model of number bonds to 10. We then found all the ways you can make 10 with 2 parts and wrote the numbers to show the size of each part and the whole. We did this really well and had lots of fun!

We are doing a history of maths week across school. Year One decided to look at how numbers began. Why are they important? What would happen if we didn't have numbers and couldn't count? We thought about how we use numbers to measure time and so we couldn't have birthdays or Christmas. We wouldn't know how old we were or how long until dinner. There are so many things we use numbers for; maths is part of everything we do! 

There were times long ago in history where numbers didn't exist and we thought about how people would have managed. We went outside to gather sticks to make a fire. Mrs Jones told us to gather sticks but couldn't tell us when we had the right amount as numbers didn't exist. Cavemen simply knew when they had 'enough' so Mrs Jones could only say if we had enough, too many or too few. Eventually we all had enough sticks to make the perfect fire. It took a very long time for everyone to gather just the right amount of sticks because we didn't have numbers. This really made us think about how important numbers are and why having a common system is valuable. We also had lots of fun!

Spring 1

We started this term looking at number bonds to 10 to make sure we could remember and understand them. We did really well with this so we are now looking at number bonds to 20 and how we could work them out.  We did some investigating using materials we selected ourselves. 

Some children chose to use unifix. We knew we would need to have 2 sticks of ten as there are 2 tens in 20. Most children knew how to work systematically to find all the possible ways of making 20 using 2 numbers. We even asked if we could have some paper to record so we knew how many different ways there were. We are Maths Magicians! 

Spring 2

The Problem with Chocolate!

The inventor has a problem – he wants to invent a new chocolate bar but isn’t sure how to split it up! He said his chocolate bar will be as big as a black rod. He asked the children to find out all the ways they can make the black rods ie red add red add white and so on. Children were able to use the rods to make an equivalent or equal length using other colours. We talked about how the rods needed to be the same and what other terms the children knew. They came up with equal and balanced and then learnt the new term equivalent to. We talked about the equals symbol and that this was the symbol they could use. Children investigated which Cuisenaire rods they could use to make the equivalent length to the black rod.  Some children chose to record by writing down what they were doing. Some wrote “b  equivalent to y+r    b equals r+w+w”     “Black is the same as yellow and red. We tried black and bloo but it was to big we tried yellow and red.”